Peanut Allergies and the Future of Democracy

Parents are picketing a school in Edgewater, Florida because of restrictions the school put in place to protect a child with a peanut allergy (thanks to my sister for alerting me):

To summarize: a number of parents apparently feel that common-sense measures such as regular hand-washing (which the school is legally required to enforce by the Americans with Disabilities Act) are too onerous to bear. They are demanding that instead this child be removed from the school.

What's going on here? First of all, the claim that these procedures are taking away from educational time is ridiculous. A child with even a moderate behavior problem will waste far more instructional time than these hand-washing procedures ever could. But disruptive students aren't targeted for picketing by parents. Then there's the distraction created by the protesters themselves, which I'm sure is seeping into the classroom.

So it's not about educational time. What is it about then? I can't read these parents' minds, but there are disturbing clues in the language that some of them are using. "They're trying to take away all our rights," says one parent, while a sign reads:

To which rights are they referring, exactly? The Right of Sullied Hands? The Rights of the Unwashed Masses?

This picture is so disturbing because the methods and language of democratic civil rights movements are being used to sacrifice the educational rights of one child so that others can be spared a few minor inconveniences. In this way, these protests are part of a larger, unsettling pattern. The past few years (or perhaps decades?) have seen a subtle shift in the way that terms such as "rights", "justice" and "democracy" are invoked in the US. More and more, these terms are being used to defend indvidual, rather than collective interests, and these individual interests are defined in increasingly narrow and selfish ways.

Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink… the list is long. But it is not a list of political grievances in the conventional sense.

Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that “the people” can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

Unsettlingly, the one recent US protest movement on behalf of collective action---the showdown over collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin---has apparently failed. The result is a further weakening of unions, themselves one of the few institutional standard-bearers of the idea that we can achieve more together than apart.

If it is true, as some reports say, that this classroom has 32 students then the real, but hidden, issue is that the student/te­acher ratio is so high that none of the students can effectively be taught as individual­s.

Do the protesting parents really want a school that can be efficientl­y run in assembly line fashion by excluding those that are most obviously different? If so, whose child should be next?

In the long run, this attitude will create a weakened society in which only the biggest bullies win.

Is collective vs. individual action the right lens through which to view this protest? The protesters are fighting to keep a public institution operating the way that they're used to -- without interference from doctors or the government. ("Keep your damn government hands off my kid's public school!" would be a fitting motto.)

That certainly is collective action -- they've just excluded one poor kid from the collective.

@Martijn-That's interesting. I hadn't realized these attitudes had spread to Europe. But it makes a certain amount of sense in the Netherlands.

@Kevin-Yes, there are aspects of the Republican agenda that are very supportive of certain government institutions. But I'm not referring to Republicans in general--just the new libertarian strain epitomized by the Tea Party. The Lilla article traces the philosophical lineage of this movement, and shows how they have taken ideas from both parties.

@Gaythia-Good point. I completely agree

@Daniel-Yes, this is something of a paradox. The protests themselves are collective action, but the goal is (I would argue) individual and family-based. There's no sense of "let's make things better for everyone," just "I don't want my kid to be inconvenienced."

I'm planning a follow-up post to further clarify the issues of individual vs. collective priorities.

I feel like freedom has two spectrums; we have "freedom from" and "freedom to" in our country. I would like to know that when I attend a school, I should have the freedom from being harassed by my class-mates (like bullying, for example). I think too many people in this country think about only the "to" part.

Timely! The school where i work just instigated a no peanut policy, since many of our kids (and many autistic kids in general) have a peanut allergy. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why, out of all things, this got people up in arms. Who cares if you can't eat peanuts at work? How is that more important than preventing a student from going into anaphylactic shock? And yet a lot of serious issues that do need to be examined get the opposite reaction...what is going on...

I'm not sure the push-back in Wisconsin was a failure. There were two state senators unseated in recall elections, after all.

I'm probably a bit more optimistic about the prospects for collective action because I think we are seeing a media-amplified phenomenon here. Political currents change very quickly after long periods of apparent stasis.

However, we can surely find time to talk about this next week when you visit us in Washington. I've already booked a time slot before your seminar.

Written by

Ben Allen

I am an assistant professor of mathematics at Emmanuel College in Boston, and a research associate at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University. My research is in evolutionary game theory, mathematical modeling of cancer, and other topics in evolution and complex systems. benjcallen at gmail.